"Let’s admit it: travelling with your romantic partner is maybe 70% fun, and 30% stress. There’s so much pressure to HAVE A GREAT TIME, and find THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. It gets exhausting. So I tried to give my partner, who is great at planning, a night off of his Yelp! duties. I’d find us a nice sushi place and he could have a nap. The problem is, I am an Internet idiot. I don’t know how to use Yelp! I don’t drill down into the nitty-gritty of the reviews. I assume that if something is #1 it’s because it’s the best, right? WRONG. We ended up at this tourist trap ‘healthy’ sushi place where the prices were high, the portions were small, and the brown rice was falling apart before you got it to your mouth. It made neither of us happy, and yet – both being people-pleasers – we sat there in semi-silence, trying not to acknowledge what a ‘disaster’ this was turning out to be. (A ‘disaster’ in that First World “We’re on vacation, having a great sushi dinner is a high-stakes affair - and we blew it” sense of ‘disaster’.) The next day the weather was bad, so we went to see ‘Inside Out’, the Pixar movie about learning how to regulate your emotions. We loved it. It was exactly what we needed in that moment. The reset button was pressed and we were back on track. So, feeling safe enough with the person you love to ugly cry at a Disney film because you just can’t take the pressure to HAVE FUN any more: that’s one definition of JOY. "
PD Walter
Toronto, Ontario